Fear and everyday life in rural Nepal Judith Pettigrew • Kamal Adhikari Published online: 14 November 2009 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 Abstract This paper analyses fear in a village in central Nepal during the ‘People’s War’. Spanning the years from 1999 to 2008, the paper illustrates how the different phases of the insurgency and individual circumstances resulted in people’s rela- tionship with fear changing over time. By presenting a chronological analysis of fear, the authors draw attention to the interrelationship between fear, temporality and sociality and show that fear is always contextually situated, differently experienced through time and related to personal circumstances. Villagers had strongly developed coping strategies which they drew upon to support themselves and decrease their fear. Some people, however, suffered such a degree of structural violence that experiencing fear was seen as a privilege. Others denied their fear as part of their performance of manliness while others coped by ridiculing fear. Although a certain amount of suspicion and mistrust lingered, most people recovered from the impact of chronic fear. They fully returned to their field and forest work as well as their previous social activities following the peace agreement of 2006. Keywords Nepal Á Maoist insurgency Á Fear Á Temporality Á Coping strategies Introduction Although the ethnography of political violence has received considerable attention over the last decade, the study of conflict-related fear has received relatively limited consideration (for exceptions see Green 1995; Lysaght 2005; Skidmore 2004; J. Pettigrew (&) University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland e-mail: judi.pettigrew@ul.ie K. Adhikari University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, Scotland e-mail: r02kap9@abdn.ac.uk 123 Dialect Anthropol (2009) 33:403–422 DOI 10.1007/s10624-009-9131-8